SvenGeier

foone, 14 days ago to random

Properly photographing a 3.5" floppy disk for archival is annoyingly complicated. The label has THREE sides!

I've already built an automated system to take a picture of the front of a disk, but really I need to take THREE photos if I want to get the whole thing.

That means either three cameras or I need to rotate the disk 90° and then 180°, which is going to really stress the limits of my mechanical engineering skills.

christianp, 15 days ago (edited 15 days ago) to random

Pals, what's the least egregious TV I can buy today, in the UK?
I want as little "smart" internet-connected nonsense as possible. Not bothered about 4k or massive size, but it should sound and look good.

That is, what's the Brother laser printer of TVs?

foone, 4 days ago to random

I was copying a Totally Legal Game Backup onto my roommate's switch and it confused Windows so much that it told me I had the wrong floppy diskette in the drive.

pvonhellermannn, 13 days ago to random

Sums up everything #Gaza #AI #ChatGPT #Racism

quixoticgeek, 15 days ago to random

A friend of mine is a Doctor. On the train this morning on their way to work the call comes out. "Do we have any doctors on board?".

Finally. Friend grabs their bag and makes way through the train. Only to find 14 other doctors had done the same thing...

Guess that route is popular with medical staff on their way to work...

dpiponi, 7 days ago to random

Given a random number generator that generates points uniformly in the unit interval [0,1] can you generate uniformly distributed points in the unit circle using only algebraic functions? In a finite number of steps - so no rejection sampling, loops, recursion. No "almost always" finite either.

Just wondering about sitiations where it seems you can't avoid trig functions.

christianp, 12 days ago to random

Microsoft Teams continues to reveal its true nature as a billion sprint goals in a trenchcoat:

When you attach an image to a post, it's saved at the top of the Sharepoint folder belonging to the channel. (So the "files" tab becomes a cluttered mess, but that's not what I'm cross about now)

As well as restrictions on valid filenames, filenames of attachments have to be unique.

So if you've attached drawing.png once before, and upload another drawing.png, Teams asks if you want to replace the original, or keep both. If you keep both, it adds (1) to the filename.

... unless there's already a "drawing (1).png", in which case it asks you AGAIN what you want to do.

Is there a Big Brain Cloud Services reason it can't automatically find the smallest number that works?

#MicrosoftTeams

julesh, 4 days ago to random

Old people, not content with merely destroying the economy for young people, are now trying to actively murder young people

image/png

SvenGeier, 7 months ago to random

Until today I did not know that there is a mastodon client for Android that supports mathJax (i.e. latex rendering). I had been resigned to reading math on the desktop and using the app basically for skimming clear text only.
If you are like me, then go to the Android play store and download "mathstodon" (yes, really). Looks and feels like the generic tusky except that suddenly you can read equations!
(Now I just need to find the time to spend online...)

gregeganSF, 14 days ago to random

I guess the best way to get spectacular improvements in the performance of your code is to do something spectacularly inefficient in the first version.

I’ve been working on a project that needs to perform computations on a quantity X along with several dozen of its derivatives wrt a parameter t, i.e. X'(t), X''(t), ... This is a form of “automatic differentiation”, but with a large number of derivatives.

There are simple rules for performing basic arithmetic on these vectors of derivatives; addition is trivial, and multiplication only grows linearly with the order of the derivative in the number of terms in each formula.

But the derivatives of 1/X and √X, written as sums of products of powers of derivatives of X, scale horrendously: the number of terms for the nth derivative is equal to the number of integer partitions of n:

1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 15, 22, 30, 42, 56, 77, 101, 135, 176, 231, 297, 385, 490, 627 ...

And for a while, I thought, well, that’s just the way it is, I’ll have to live with it.

But luckily that turned out to be very naive! In fact, you can just write down the formula for the derivatives of a product, X(t)Y(t) = 1, and then solve that system by back-substitution to get all the derivatives of Y from those of X. Similarly for the square root, from Y^2(t) = X(t).

So the payoff for being dumb in the first place was the glorious feeling of seeing my code now running exponentially faster than before!

lowqualityfacts, 12 days ago to random

Wow, that's a lot of combinations.
https://patreon.com/lowqualityfacts

SvenGeier, 10 months ago to random

If the great power of LLMs is to look at a sequence of tokens and sus out which one plausibly comes next, has anybody tried to train one of these on the first trillion (or however many we have these days) digits of π and let it try to give us the next thousand or so?
And then check how many it got right?
We'd all expect it to get 10% (in decimal) but imagine if it got 20% or 30%...

SvenGeier, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago) to random

Math people, help me out with a conversation I had with my kid about the following:

If no context information is provided, would you say that the closed interval [0,1] is

ProfKinyon, 15 days ago to random

Creating slides for a half hour talk (25 minutes + 5 for questions). So 100 slides should do, right? 😁

lowqualityfacts, 4 days ago to random

That blows my mind.
https://patreon.com/lowqualityfacts

SvenGeier, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

I heard today is World Cat Day?
(I was going to attach a video of an animal here, but I seem to be unable to upload it to mathstodon. Is there a size limit less than the usual 40MB here?)

ProfKinyon, 1 day ago to random

I still think "A and B are equipollent" sounds like it means "A and B have the same pollen allergies."

ProfKinyon, 14 days ago to random

The purpose of a morning plenary conference talk is to give audience members time to prepare their afternoon talks

SvenGeier, 22 days ago to random

#tilingTuesday i guess?

SvenGeier, 2 months ago to random

Here presented without comment...

SvenGeier, 4 months ago to random

The "cutest" thing about the number 2024 that I can come up with is that it can be generated from the digits 1,,..,5 like this:

2024=3⁴×5²−1

Anybody got any other "cute" things to do with that new year?

camilo, 13 days ago to art Spanish

"Vigo the Carpathian. Born 1505, died 1610. He was poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disembowled, drawn and quartered... Not exactly a man of the people"

#ghostbusters #cazafantasmas #art #CharlesIII #KingCharles

SvenGeier, 15 days ago to random

#TilingTuesday

SvenGeier, 11 days ago to random